Wednesday, April, 8 at 6:00 PM
Chiara Barzini
on Joan Didion’s The White Album
in a conversation with Michael Frank.
Moderator: Claudio Pagliara.
INKWAVES invites Italian and American writers to reflect on a book from the other country that has deeply influenced their writing and their lives.
For this opening conversation, Chiara Barzini has chosen Joan Didion’s The White Album, a work whose vision of California at the end of an era speaks powerfully to Barzini’s own latest book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams — (L’ultima acqua. Il sogno perduto di Los Angeles).
Both writers turn to one of California’s defining and most fragile elements: water. In their pages, the destiny of Los Angeles — its spectacular ascent and its uncertain future — becomes a reflection on desire, illusion, and the limits of human power.
“I chose to speak about Didion’s The White Album,” says Barzini, “because of its powerful sense of the end of an era, capturing a moment when California’s promise begins to unravel. That vision resonated deeply with my work on Aqua, which explores disillusionment, the anxieties of a changing world, and the lingering feeling of a fallen empire.”
Bio
Chiara Barzini is an award-winning Italian screen and fiction writer. She lived and studied in the United States where she covered lifestyle and culture stories for numerous American and Italian publications. She writes and translates both in English and Italian and is the author of the short story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and the novel Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (Doubleday, 2017) which was a Best Book of the Year for Vogue,Esquire, Elle, Bustle, and the Guardian, and a best summer book for the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, BBC, and Oprah! magazine. Her latest book Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams, a hybrid of memoir, travel and cultural history that explores how water altered LA and the history of film, was published in 2025 by Canongate in the UK and was a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement. Her fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She has a regular column in D Repubblica and is a Literature Advisor at the American Academy in Rome.
InkWaves in a few words
“[…] with A Farewell to Arms, what happens to me is what happens with the greatest books, and I must think that this, among yours, is the greatest. A Farewell to Arms, in short, is one of the books I want to go on living with, and I wish it would never end.”
This is what Elio Vittorini wrote in a letter to Ernest Hemingway on March 12, 1949, speaking about A Farewell to Arms.
There are books that, once encountered, ask us to remain close to them.
They accompany us over time and speak about who we are, the choices we make, and how we have arrived where we are.
A book is an encounter—with a story and with the person who wrote it. Sometimes with someone we might never have chosen to listen to in real life; at other times with a distant brother or sister we didn’t know we had.
Because books can do this: shorten distances, reveal connections, dismantle barriers, and travel across the waves of time.
From this idea comes Inkwaves, the literary series conceived by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York in collaboration with the Alferj literary agency.
A dialogue between Italian and American writers, invited to reflect on a book written in English or Italian that has profoundly influenced their writing and their lives.
They will be joined by American scholars, researchers, translators, and publishers.
Upcoming events:
• Paolo Giordano on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace – April 22, 2026
• Nicola Lagioia on Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – June 24, 2026
Reservation no longer available